Time was when a bunch of trees waving their branches overhead was enough. I’d lie on my back, on the lawn, and watch the clouds catch in and release from their branches. That was enough to pass a summer afternoon. The trees, in my case, were Midwestern oaks, ashes, maples, but that didn’t really matter; it was a timeless occupation, a fullness that...
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This much is true: it was another year when the world was going to hell. 1939. Over in Europe, the Nazis were buzzing like a nest of stirred-up hornets soon to boil over their neighbors. In the Pacific, the Japanese were off on their own adventures in conquest. But in Flagstaff, J.A. Bostwick was rendering a peaceful landscape. I don’t have the full...
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In our family, spoons have come handed down through earth and air. The first is easier to explain, as I’m sure the cupboards or other reliquaries of many have been enriched by the addition of silverware from long-dead grandmothers and great-aunts. As have ours. But we have also literally unearthed a few. Every year there is occasion to dig in our rocky Old...
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Danielle Stephens can vividly recall the bomb’s early light, the brilliant early-morning flash seen on horseback from ranch country up in the Aquarius Mountains. Everyone knew it was coming. The bomb tests were always announced in advance and planned for days when the wind was blowing eastrather than west toward populous California. Sometimes the tests...
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The day before the eclipse, the Middle Fork Cafe in Lander, Wyo., was bustling at lunchtime, the usual crowd of Sunday locals and Yellowstone-bound tourists vastly swelled by twosomes and families of eclipse chasers. They were on their way somewhere else: Lander was right on the edge of totality. If you’d already traveled hours or days to get there,...
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